"In three hours, it will be the moment that will decide the fate of Russia and the world, victory, great Russia will go to a new peak, and if we fail, we will fall into the bottomless abyss! And all of you here will be sinners in Russia! Whether you become a hero or a sinner depends on your performance! General Gallen let out a long sigh and said to everyone who was doing it. Unlike in the past, this time the attack was launched not at midnight, but during the day! The current Russian army no longer expects to complete a breakthrough in the campaign solely on its own, because it is almost impossible! All they have to do is act as bait! Lure the Germans to send more troops to the front line, lure the Germans to expose more hidden firing points! With the slightly blunt style of play of saturation attack, the opponent is grinded to death!

Tens of thousands of artillery pieces of all kinds are already ready, (most of them mortars.) Thousands of planes have also filled airports (about 90 percent of the total number of single-engine aircraft). More than 3,000 tanks and 800,000 front-line troops have been deployed on the tortuous line between Russia and Ukraine! And this is only a part of the Three Kingdoms Army, behind the first-line troops, there are a total of 700,000 second-line troops, and the Russians have already prepared the first-line troops for victory, and they are ready to immediately replenish the second-line troops. To the north and south of the salient, millions of U.S. and British troops are also ready to go, and as many as 5,000 armored spearheads composed of various tanks, assault guns, and tank destroyers have been deployed, and above them, there will be as many as 1 U.S. and British air forces. 10,000 aircraft provide air support and battlefield shelter! In this battle, the three countries took out almost all the money they had prepared for half a year! A battle of unprecedented scale kicked off with the roar of heavy artillery!

On a front stretching for hundreds of kilometers, the Russians chose to attack at five locations at the same time, and the dense barrage lasted from 2 to 5 hours, and then the infantry, guided by tanks, rushed to the German lines, accompanied by the roar of heavy artillery on the ground. Countless planes took off from the rear airfield, tens of thousands of high-power engines roared in the air, and bombs and shells with a death whistle fell on the ground.

The Germans seemed stunned at first. The Russians' reckless attacks made it impossible for the Germans to find a breakthrough point, and under the baptism of blood and fire, the Germans' forward defense line became crumbling. A lot of units and firing points hidden in depth began to be exposed, and the Germans began to draw troops from the 2nd line, but these units suffered heavy losses under the suppression and blows of the Allied air forces!

"Are the Entente insane? Their attacks were undisciplined, crushing them like crushing plates. Unfocused, I still haven't figured out what they're trying to do! Looking at the sand table in front of him, and the red arrows indicating the direction of the Russian attack, Manstein fell into deep thought, his favorite way to do this is to wear down the opponent with fortifications and defensive troops, and then find the opponent's breakthrough point, when the opponent has just broken through. Before the follow-up troops arrived, the most elite armored spearhead was concentrated to completely crush the opponent's attacking force, and the opponent's offensive was fundamentally disintegrated. But the current situation makes him unable to start!

"That's actually good news, because it turns out that such an aimless attack may put us on the back for a while, but as time goes on, their losses will skyrocket. An adversary with a weak follow-up cannot pose a threat to our positions in depth. Guderian seemed more relaxed, and the opponent's attack seemed ferocious. However, Guderian has also seen more ferocious attacks than this, and if you only look at the density of troops and the level of equipment, the opponent in front of you is really more than a grade worse than the enemy in the Middle East!

"But the question is, what do we do now? Waiting for the surface line of defense to be breached? This kind of attack by the other side may not be able to cause a breakthrough in depth, but they can at least push our entire front back by more than ten to twenty kilometers. Maybe we can wear down our opponents in terms of exchange ratio or consumption, but don't forget. The empire has one more opponent in the Middle East direction! Although there is a tacit understanding between them, who dares to say that China will not continue to move westward? Although we have a good deck of cards in our hands, no one can say whether they will be taken by our own people. Unless. Manstein's heart was filled with anxiety. Huaxia and the Entente are still allies at least on the surface, and there is no reason why Huaxia should not take advantage of this opportunity in order to achieve its own goals!

"It's still a little early to dispatch the main force, so you can take a look at the current information. Most of the troops involved in the offensive are Russian troops, and they have a certain gap with the American and British armies in terms of equipment and quality, and they do not have the ability to cut into our depth. Modell asked rhetorically.

"There is only one answer, they consume us again, and they want to mobilize us! When our main forces are dispatched, the American and British forces will take advantage of the situation to break through our defensive line and complete the encirclement of part of our army! Our main opponents in Europe are still Britain and the United States! This is true on the Western Front, and it is also true on the Eastern Front! Therefore, our main forces must not be dispatched, otherwise under the joint attack of the US and British air forces and land forces, the losses will be quite heavy! Modell thought for a moment and continued.

"If this happens, will our front collapse and we will lose the troops at the front in vain. If the American and British legions do not suffer heavy losses, then they will always be the sword of Damocles hanging over our heads, and we do not know when they will fall. It's a bad feeling, and I can't stress enough that we can't keep our forces on the Eastern Front forever! Manstein emphasized.

"Look at their air force. The American bombers have covered almost the entire Ukrainian region, almost all transportation hubs, fortresses, warehouses, troop assembly points have been carpet bombed, our troop losses are bearable, but the logistics will certainly not be able to support us in the border areas to block the opponent's offensive, if we want to contain the opponent's offensive, we must first weaken their air superiority, and this will take time, the air force can only compete for air supremacy west of the Dnieper River and several bridgeheads on the east bank at this stage. The area of our decisive battle with our opponents should not be the borders, but the areas east of the Dnieper! ”

Moder is still steady, and the risk of brazenly mobilizing most of the opponent's air raids is too great. And if there were huge losses on the Eastern Front, the elite troops that Germany had prepared after more than ten years would probably be completely exhausted. If the land is gone, you can take it back, but if the people are gone, what should I do?!

"That's too much of a step back. His Majesty the Emperor and the General Staff would not have agreed. And if we lose here, I'm afraid we will never have a chance to restore the old borders again. Even if we thwarted the opponent's attack. It may still not be possible to push the front back! Guderian said worriedly.

"There is no need to think about this, the outbreak of the Second World War was originally a mistake, and we will have to pay some price for our mistakes after all, the fall of Turkey, the loss of the Middle East sphere of influence and now part of the Ukrainian land will be part of these costs, if one day, for the continuation of the empire, we may have to pay an even heavier price! Don't be surprised when that happens! Field Marshal Bock, who had not spoken, stopped the dispute with a word, and Moder's idea was passable.

"Okay then. According to our current intelligence, the United States and Britain may attack us from both flanks of the Russian army, but we have very limited mobile forces at hand and can only gain an advantage in one direction, and if we only choose one direction, the other force will still kill us. Guderian finished. He pointed to the two units on the sand table that were located on both flanks of the Russian army.

"Let's hit the northern front first, the American troops on the northern front are interspersed with a greater distance. Our defenses are weaker, and the enemy can bypass the well-fortified support points, and in such a wide area, it is always more cost-effective to attack than to defend. We will have more chances, the southern front is the closest to the Dnieper, and the supply is relatively fast. And we have strong fortifications and defenses there, so we can delay our opponents by defending them layer by layer. Modell suggested.

The approximate pulse of the Entente, the Germans had already felt it, and they could be sure that the deepest line of the Entente's attack on this time would not go beyond the Dnieper. And the focus of the Germans' defense must also be on the Dnieper, if the east bank is lost, then the Germans will probably never return to the place where the battle began! So the Germans also chose the most secure way, the air force began to consume the opponent from both sides of the Dnieper River, and the troops on the front line entered the fortified area for defense, when the American and British troops thought that the Germans could not stop it, and began to attack from both flanks, the Germans armored iron fist smashed the spearhead of the opponent's attack one by one!

"I hope that at that time, the air forces of the United States and Britain will not be as rampant as they are now!" Feeling the faint vibration of the bomb explosion overhead, the German officers who were meeting in the underground bunker prayed silently. And just when the army generals were formulating a counterattack plan, the air force, under the command of Richthofen Jr., was already fighting with the American and British air forces in the dark! The elite units that Germany withdrew from the Middle East were sent directly to the Eastern Front after a short period of repair, so the performance of the air force was much better than that of the front-line units of the army! "Damn it, it's a storm bird! How did the Germans deploy so many jet fighters on the Eastern Front? Did they conjure up out of thin air? "As far as the eye can see, a dark shadow is rapidly approaching at a speed that propeller planes cannot reach! The P47s, located above the box formation, went to meet the enemy, but soon found that it seemed difficult to stop their opponents at such an altitude, as they were facing not only the Storm Birds, but also a large number of TA152s! The high-altitude fighters of both sides quickly became entangled, and the high-speed jets quickly made their way through the melee group and rushed towards the box formation!

"What are we going to do? They rushed up! Damn, don't the guys above know the setting and give the plan? "A gunner struggled to operate the remote control turret to attack a ME262 fighter on the side, dense 50 caliber machine gun bullets in the air to draw an arc, several of the bullets accurately hit the opponent, but the damage was limited, only to see this storm bird in the air to pull an elegant arc, when about 500 meters away from the target, the storm bird suddenly burst out under the wing of two rows of dazzling fire, 24 rounds of 50MM rockets flew out of the wooden pylon, like locusts flying to the target, In just a few seconds, a heavy bomber with a take-off weight of more than 30 tons turned into a huge fireball in the air! The combination of the R4M rockets and jets newly equipped by the Germans raised the threat of interceptors to a whole new level!

"What do we have planned? Those generals simply could not have imagined that the Germans would have these things on the Eastern Front! Prior to this, storm birds had only been seen in large numbers in the Middle East and Europe! There are even very few TA152s, and we've never seen a brigade-sized FW190D9 before! Who knows where the Germans sent these reinforcements! The captain's voice was intermittent with the roar of the machine guns, and the American bomber units tried their best to protect themselves, but under the interception of the Luftwaffe, which far exceeded expectations, the expensive B17 bombers with their crews turned into ashes!

Although on the whole, the Americans succeeded in dropping bombs where they wanted to go, but under the fierce resistance of the Luftwaffe, every bomb dropped by the Americans was dripping blood, and before the Germans were killed, the Americans' bombs were stained red with their own blood! The Luftwaffe was unusually strong on the Eastern Front beyond the expectations of Li May and others, who originally thought that they would only encounter some second-rate air force units on the Eastern Front, but even the Luftwaffe's Storm Bird appeared in formation, and the Luftwaffe fighting at home made up for the short legs of the jet aircraft, which made the just beginning of the Ledge Battle full of unknowns!

"The Germans are still fully using pontoons and docks to deliver supplies to the east coast, even various heavy vehicles, they are beginning to fortify the defenses of key transport nodes, and their air force is more capable than we can ever imagine, and on the first day of fighting, we lost almost 2 times more than what was tolerated! With such high battle losses, our follow-up attacks are unsustainable, and tactical support and strategic bombing must be abandoned! "Shortly after the Battle of Ledges began, Li Mei received such a report!

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The new book "The Road to the Rise of Germany" is gradually fattening, and two chapters are updated today, I hope that all new and old readers will support it a lot~~~. (To be continued.) )